The New Orleans museum looking back at slavery to help America move forward

In 1989 on his first visit to the United States, Senegalese historian Dr Ibrahima Seck heard a Mississippi bluesman perform.

“What I was hearing was so familiar,” says Seck of that mini concert by the legendary James “Son” Thomas, who died in 1993. “It was like home.”

That personal connection inspired Seck, whose homeland’s Gorée Island was a major slave trading outpost, to return to school and earn a doctorate in the history of the institution that brought so many West Africans to the United States – along with their songs, foods, skills and religions. Now, working at an old Louisiana indigo and sugar plantation transformed into a “site of memory,” Seck is guiding others to a deeper, human understanding of one of the darkest chapters of America’s story.